(60b) Celebrating 200 Years (RPI) and 110 Years (CHME):Three Technical Highlights from an Academic Career

This year Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the oldest public English-speaking technical university, is celebrating its 200-year anniversary, and the Department of Chemical Engineering (now called Chemical and Biological Engineering) is 110 years old. To celebrate these milestones, I will describe three technical highlights during my 50-year academic career. The underlying foundation of my academic research career in separation of molecules are the texts “Transport Phenomena” by Bird Stewart and Lightfoot, and more recently “Analysis of Transport Phenomena” by William M Deen.

All three problems that I address involve mass transport with particle or solute fluid mechanics above and in synthetic polymer membranes. Each discusses how the behavior of dissolved solutes or particles interact with themselves or with the polymer matrix. The build-up of solute or particles in the fluid near the top face of an operating filtration membrane (but non-interacting with the membrane) is called concentration polarization (CP) and is endemic with all pressure-driven filtration processes. I will describe the first mathematical and experimental measurements of CP. Next, I will introduce how fluid instabilities were used to clean the accumulation of particles on the top face of an operating filtration membrane. Third, I will present a recent discovery that flow through commercial microporous membranes occurs through both the pores and channel segments that are shaped from the phase inversion process that forms these polymer membranes.